x64 Assembly Language Step-by-Step, 4th Edition

APPENDIX AThe Return of the Insight Debugger

In the 2009 edition of this book, SASM didn't exist yet, and I used a free debugger called Insight for my debugging demos. A few months after the book was published, all of the Linux repositories removed Insight without any explanation.

Yes, Insight is something of an odd bird. It was originally written in an interpreted language called Tcl, with a GUI widget set called Tk. Tcl/Tk (as it came to be known) was first released in 1991. The Tk widgets are modeled on those in Motif, which was one of the very first GUIs and part of the Unix Common Desktop Environment. I've heard grumbles about Tk looking “old,” but the real problem with Insight is that the Tcl interpreter was linked right into the executable. This isn't unheard of, but it's kind of a peculiar thing to do.

Insight's source code is open-source and available online. Here and there since 2009, people have put together scripts for building Insight from source. I've tried several, and most of them simply didn't work on recent Linux distros.

Then in 2018, a programmer named antony-jr on GitHub did something remarkable: He created an Insight appimage. An is a binary program for Linux created to run without installation. You download the appimage, log into Linux as root, and drop the appimage into /usr/bin. That puts it in your search path, and it can then be run from any folder under your Home folder.

To avoid publishing a link here that might change, I suggest a web search for ...